While addressing an audience at CIA headquarters to mark the
successful raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan that killed
long-sought Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May 2011, Panetta
revealed the name of the ground commander of the US Special
Forces unit that carried out the operation. Panetta told AP
through a spokesman that he did not know Boal was in the room at
the time.

"I had no idea that individual was in the audience,"
Panetta said in a statement. "To this day, I wouldn't know
him if he walked into the room."

Panetta spokesman Jeremy Bash said the former CIA director
assumed that everyone present at the time of the speech had
proper clearance for such a discussion.

Judicial Watch filed the original Freedom of Information Act
request on June 21, 2013, which on Tuesday yielded 200 pages of
documents concerning the CIA’s internal investigation of its part
in the acclaimed 2012 film on the bin Laden raid.

The film became the subject of heated debate in Washington and
beyond about how much
access major Hollywood filmmakers had to sensitive,
classified information about such a paramount matter. Some
criticized the film for glorifying torture, or “enhanced
interrogation techniques,” while others said the abusive
tactics shown in the film did not, in fact, lead to the finding
of bin Laden.

The issue became the subject of inquiry for the
Senate Intelligence Committee, as the film was in the running for
major
awards. Yet the committee’s investigation ended
in February 2013. An anonymous source close to the matter told
Reuters that the conclusion was that the CIA did not tell the
filmmakers that "enhanced interrogations" led to the
capturing of bin Laden, but instead merely helped develop
characters in the film.

Conservative, government-transparency advocacy group Judicial
Watch reported that over 90 lines of Panetta’s speech - made on
June 24, 2011 during an agency awards ceremony marking the raid -
were redacted in Tuesday’s release.

“You have made me proud of the CIA family. And you have made
me proud as an Italian to know that bin Laden sleeps with the
fishes,” Panetta said at the end of his address.

The documents show that the CIA Office of Security (OS) concluded
in October 2012 that “the Agency’s Security policy and
administrative procedures were not followed in allowing Mr. Boal,
a member of the media, access to the classified Bin Ladin
Operation Award Ceremony.”

Judicial Watch points out that in addition to Boal’s presence at
the CIA ceremony, the filmmakers were involved in meetings and
communications with government agencies during the making of
“Zero Dark Thirty,” as revealed in August 2012 by
another information request by the advocacy group.

And according to a June 2011 email from Benjamin Rhodes, deputy
national security advisor for strategic communications, the Obama
administration was “trying to have visibility into the UBL
(Usama bin Laden) projects and this is likely a high profile
one.”

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd told AP that the agency has since
"overhauled its procedures for interaction with the
entertainment industry after an extensive internal review."
The CIA now has "a centralized record-keeping system for
entertainment industry requests and, earlier this year, issued
detailed guidance on contact with the industry and support for
entertainment-related projects," in order to shield
classified material, he said.